Many Hands Make Light Work - Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer Science and Other Improbable Things - page 97

FLOOSH. FLOOSH. FLASH. FLOOSH. FLASH.
FLOOSH. FLASH. FLASH. FLOOSH. FLOOSH.
“He answered back! What did he say?” Laurie asked.
“Oh, he just said 'hi.'”
“All that just for 'hi'?”
“That's how the Baudot Code works,” said Ping. “Sentences are made of words, and words
are made of letters, right? In the same way, we make letters out of FLIPs and FLOPs. Like
this.”
01001 = L
11000 = A
10011 = U
01010 = R
01100 = I
10000 = E
“That's pretty neat! But I still think it's a lot of work just to say 'hi.'” Laurie said.
“Maybe you're right,” Ping said, smiling. “But now that the hard work of building the Net-
work is finished, we can do something really interesting: use the Network to make itself bet-
ter.”
“How do you do that?”
“Well, I'm working on a way to use two colors of lights. Fresnel has an idea for a simpler
Code that uses only four FLIPs or FLOPs, though I'm not too sure how that will work. We
use the old Baudot Code to talk to each other about our ideas for new codes, and then try
them out.”
“So . . . you can use the Network to talk about how to use the Network?”
“And you helped make it possible, Laurie, by delivering all of those telescopes. Now, the
Network will only get better and better as we learn how to use it. We can already pass a mes-
sage from one end of the Network to the other in just a few minutes! Even the Doppelganger
takes a couple of days to deliver the mail that far. Everyone will want to use it once we work
out the bugs.”
“But . . . what about Winsome? Is she going to lose her job?” Laurie asked.
“What? No, not at all! The Network was her idea.”